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WEDNESDAY, March 12, 2014 (HealthDay News) -- Cigarettes
might "trick" smokers' brains to respond more strongly to
positive images of smoking than to negative images, a small,
new study suggests.

Researchers used brain scans to assess the emotional
responses of 30 smokers as they looked at images of
smoking-related consequences, such as lung cancer; other
disturbing images not related to smoking, such as an old man on
his deathbed; and positive images of smoking.

"We observed a bias depending on how smoking is portrayed,"
study first author Le-Anh Dinh-Williams, a student at the
Montreal Mental Health University Institute, said in a
University of Montreal news release.

"For example, the brains of the smokers in our study were
more aroused by images that showed smoking in a positive light
than by images that encouraged them to stop," Dinh-Williams
said. "They were also more affected by [negative] non-smoking
related images than by images of the specific negative
consequences of smoking."

The study appeared in the April issue of the journal
Progress in Neuro-Psychopharmacology and Biological
Psychiatry.

Dinh-Williams said about 20 percent of adults in Canada and
the United States smoke even though they know it's
dangerous.

"We wanted to understand why knowing about the negative
health impacts of tobacco does not prevent smokers from
lighting up," Dinh-Williams said.

About 70 percent to 95 percent of smokers who quit will
start smoking again within a year, the researchers said.

Study co-author Stephane Potvin, an assistant professor in
the psychiatry department at the University of Montreal, said
there are a host of factors that make it hard for people to
quit smoking. "Part of the explanation could certainly be
because cigarettes 'trick' the brains of smokers," he said in
the news release.

"Specifically, we discovered that the brain regions
associated with motivation are more active in smokers when they
see pleasurable images associated with cigarettes and less
active when smokers are confronted with the negative effects of
smoking," said Potvin, a researcher at the Montreal Mental
Health University Institute.

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